diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Adam Osuchowski was poking around in the deep dark places of the
kernel and came upon some hard-coded assembly that used the xadd
instruction. Because the 386 CPU didn't implement an xadd instruction,
Adam asked whether Linux still supported the 386. The xadd instruction
turned out to be just a bug, but the incident sparked a discussion
about which older systems were and were not supported under Linux.

In terms of systems supporting Symmetric
Multi-Processing (SMP), Alan
Cox remarked that the first system to support Intel's MP standard was
the 486 with external APIC. He reckoned those would be the oldest
systems capable of running SMP Linux, although he felt the earth may
have been denuded of such systems long since. Maciej
W. Rozycki
commented:

I failed to track down a single 486 SMP system that would
adhere to the MP spec. There were, and possibly still are, APIC-based 486
SMP systems out there, but most likely they are not Intel
MPS-compliant, by not providing the MP header at the very least. Thus,
Linux would have to be ported, and I gather the interest in doing so is
epsilon. Myself, I could not resist trying an APIC-based 486 SMP box
and possibly fixing issues if I found one and it was MPS-compliant,
but nothing beyond that I would say. Life's too short.

In terms of the 386, there was some speculation by various people, but
no one could say for sure whether Linux would run on them.
Jan-Benedict Glaw said he had an old, still functioning 386 that he'd
dug out of storage, and that “it still powers on and boots up that
ancient Debian version, using a 20GB (right, gigabytes) HDD.” He said
he might try experimenting with more current kernels and see whether they
worked. Various other folks pointed out that 386 CPUs were still used
in various embedded systems, and Ingo
Molnar remarked that he knew of
someone who occasionally booted up a 386 with current kernels.

So apparently the 386 is still kicking. My guess is the 286 is out of
luck though—at least until someone decides to brave those strange
waters.

Hard Plastic Books That Talk

Last year at LinuxWorld, I had the opportunity to speak with Cliff Schmidt,
the Executive Director at Literacy Bridge (www.literacybridge.org). At
that point, Cliff was showing off an audio recording device with the
eventual plan of being able to distribute sub-$10 gadgets that would allow
for education and collaboration in struggling third-world countries. The
little device that was literally in pieces back at LinuxWorld now is being
used in Ghana as part of a pilot program.

Although in many ways the less than $10 “Talking Books” lack features of
the OLPC laptops, they also offer some advantages over their big brothers.
The first is obviously in cost. Second, the audio-only interaction
enables education where illiteracy often is a stumbling block. Paired
with freely available audio recordings and the ability to record and share
additional content, the Talking Books will be able to reach people that
even the OLPC Project left behind.

Cliff Schmidt is the Executive Director of Literacy Bridge.

The Talking Books currently are being tested in Ghana.

Cool Projects Are Meant to Be Shared

This month's issue is all about cool projects, and we think the best part
about making something cool is sharing it with the world.

Have you written some awesome software? Built a cool gadget? Taken
something apart and repurposed its guts? We want to hear about it, and so
do LinuxJournal.com readers.

The next time you have a cool project on your mind, whether it's complete or
just a glimmer in your eye, log in to LinuxJournal.com and share it in our
forums. Leave a comment on articles that inspire you, and let everyone
know how you built a better mousetrap.
Someone out there has topped Shawn Powers' DIY Arcade Game
(www.linuxjournal.com/article/9732), right?

They Said It

Western society has accepted as unquestionable
a technological imperative that is quite as
arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely
the duty to foster invention and constantly to
create technological novelties, but equally the
duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally,
just because they are offered, without respect
to their human consequences.

—Lewis Mumford

The drive toward complex technical achievement offers
a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry
and bad at slum problems.

—John Kenneth Galbraith

The production of too many useful things results
in too many useless people.

—Karl Marx

For a list of all the ways technology has failed
to improve the quality of life, please press three.

—Alice Kahn

The real danger is not that computers will begin
to think like men, but that men will begin
to think like computers.

—Sydney J. Harris

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning
the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law
on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner
which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Roku—Breaking the Linux Not Invited Rule

Many of you probably are familiar with the Roku media streaming device. In a
partnership with Netflix, the Roku (www.roku.com) is one of several
officially supported devices for streaming the large collection of
Netflix's
available movies and television shows. What makes the Roku interesting is
that although Netflix doesn't support streaming its DRM-protected movies
to Linux users, the Roku itself runs Linux.

The technology to stream Netflix titles to Linux is obviously available.
Hopefully, as Linux users, we'll soon be able to join the Internet streaming
club and watch movies on our desktops. Even more exciting will be media
players like Boxee and XBMC (both of which run under Linux) being able to
stream Netflix titles.

It is still frustrating that the streaming titles offered by Netflix are
DRM-protected. The unmetered, on-demand streaming is a step in the right
direction. Hopefully, in time, companies will realize that DRM only annoys
those of us willing to spend money. It encourages pirating, rather than
discouraging it.

Non-Linux FOSS

If you're a Linux fan, there's a bit of a tendency to think
that Linux and open source are two ways of saying the same thing.
However, plenty of FOSS projects exist that don't have
anything to do with Linux, and plenty of projects originated
on Linux that now are available on other systems.

Because a fair share of our readers also use one of those other
operating systems, willingly or unwillingly, we thought we'd
highlight here in the coming months some of the FOSS projects
that fall into the above categories.

We probably all know about our BSD brethren: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and
so on,
but how many of us know about ReactOS?
ReactOS is an open-source replacement for Windows XP/2003.
Don't confuse this with something like Wine, which allows you
to run Windows programs on Linux. ReactOS is a full-up replacement
for Windows XP/2003.

Assuming you consider that good news (a FOSS replacement for Windows),
the bad news is that it's still only alpha software.
However, the further good news is that it still is under active
development; the most recent release at the time of this writing is 0.3.8, dated February 4, 2009.
For more information, visit www.reactos.org.

Free to a Good Home: Junk

I was pricing a low-end desktop computer the other day. When configuring
it, I noticed that if I added a four-year warranty, it would cost more than the
entire system! We've really come to the point where computer hardware is
like a plastic fork. If a tine breaks off, it gets thrown away. Sadly,
although throwing away plastic forks is rough on the environment, used
computers are so much more so.

Thankfully, green is the new pink, and everyone seems to be interested in
conservation and recycling. The problem is it's easier to talk about
recycling computer hardware than to do it. I work at a school
district, and we have a closet full of old CRT monitors just waiting for an
opportunity to be recycled. There aren't any recycling places in our area,
and thanks to the lead and glass, CRT monitors are very expensive to ship.
So, they sit in a closet collecting dust.

Some amazing organizations out there are working hard to focus on
another R, and rather than recycling old equipment, they reuse it.
Places like Free Geek in Portland (www.freegeek.org), which I had the
pleasure of touring last summer, take donated computer parts to create
usable systems that are sold or donated back to the community. Thanks to
Linux, those systems aren't encumbered with licensing issues. It's really
a great way to get working, viable, stable computer systems in the hands of
people who would likely never be able to afford one.

Although I'm not suggesting everyone should start a local Free Geek (although
how cool would that be!), it's possible someone in your area already
is doing something similar. Before you put that 17" CRT monitor and Pentium
II computer on the curb, try giving it away in the local newspaper. If
you like the idea of building computers for those in need, consider doing a
small-scale version of Free Geek in your garage. Don't worry about running
out of hardware, the local school district likely has computer parts piled
in closets it would love for you to “recycle”. With the power and
flexibility of Linux, and the steady supply of aging computers, perhaps the
path to world domination is by repurposing last year's Windows computers!

I think you meant to say 20 MEGAbyte hard drive. And I think that you were trying to deliberately point out how small it was with the parenthetical remark, but somewhere in the editing that "mega" became "giga". I'm quite certain there weren't any 386 machines that came with gigabyte hard drives; I don't think they had giga-anythings....

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